OIP 36.

Medinet Habu Graffiti: Facsimiles

Edited by William F. Edgerton

The ancient texts and pictures reproduced in this volume were found in modern times at Medinet Habu, but possess no other kind of unity. A few of them probably originated elsewhere: Nos. 22, 25, and 26 may well have been written by workmen of Ramses III in the quarry at Gebel Silsilah, while the ultimate provenience of Nos. 103, 212, and 338 is quite unknown. Chronologically, the interval between the earliest and the latest texts in the volume is probably as great as that from the time of Christ to the present; culturally, it spans one of the sharpest breaks which have ever cut the history of any country-the collapse of Egyptian paganism and the triumph of Christianity. In language and in purport the divergences are equally conspicuous.